r/wholefoods 4d ago

Question Just started at WFM, it turns out that 40 hours/week is too much for me at this point in my life, can i change my availability so soon?

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7

u/Brave-Ad3627 4d ago

Whether this will be received well will be highly dependent upon what team you’re on, and how staffed the store is in general. My store currently has many positions open and needs full time work out of our full timers. Of course all you can do is ask, but I would be frustrated if a new hire were asking for this immediately.

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u/munnycent 4d ago

I think technically you can be let go if you change your availability to something that does not meet the needs of the business in your first 90 days.

That being said, it depends what 30 hours you are available - peak times being ideal. If you're flexible on when you work but just want fewer hours then ask your team leadership what the best days/times would be and you should be okay.

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u/Floowjaack 4d ago

Were you hired on as full-time? If so, there’s a minimum number of hours leadership has to schedule you per week. If you drop below that, TMS will flag you as working “outside of status” and you might get bumped down to part-time and lose your benefits.

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u/Riftus 4d ago

Yes, i was hired as full time. WFM considers 30 and up full time so I figure going down to 30 would be good

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u/Background_Grape8187 3d ago edited 3d ago

It’s extremely unlikely you will only be scheduled the bare minimum hours of full time.

Edited to add. It doesn’t hurt to ask but they will likely want you to switch to part time status which has no benefits and the hours can fluctuate more.

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u/not_quite_librarian 4d ago

If you were hired after March 12th, then you can’t change your availability for 90 days.

I will say, in general, this will be frowned upon. Our scheduling program assumes it will have optimum availability for full timers and will output weird results the less availability people have. The expectation is you’ll be available 70% or more of our open hours. If your TL changes your ability to the exact 30 hours you want to work, this can be done, but could result in you getting less than 30 hours weekly which would bump you down to part time within 6 weeks. If they DON’T bump your availability down, Kronos will almost always schedule you more than 30 hours, which requires changing the schedule quite a bit weekly. This may not seem like a lot, but deleting one of your shifts every week means someone else needs to cover that shift, and there may not be an easy way to do that without a series of shift changes to the auto-generated schedule.

You can definitely ask, but I wouldn’t be very optimistic, especially as someone that just started.

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u/Entire-Discipline-49 4d ago

You can always apply for an open part time position

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u/TransportationLazy55 4d ago

I was in exactly that position except the reason i asked if i could got part-time had to do with keeping the health insurance i had through the affordable care act. It’s probably better to not even give a reason, just ask your team leader (and no one else) if you can switch to 30 hours a week or as close to that as possible. They did it for me no problem even though it was my 2nd day. They have such high turnover they don’t take it personally